Oracle Service Tag FAQ

A service tag enables automatic discovery of assets, including software and hardware. A service tag uniquely identifies each tagged asset, and allows information about the asset to be shared over a local network in a standard XML format.

One of the most basic, and at the same time, most difficult problems IT departments have is simply knowing what they have. Systems and software are installed by various team members at all times. Systems are shut down, new software is upgraded. Best practices for keeping track today often involve barcode scanning or manual spreadsheet entries. Leveraging the discovery capabilities that service tags provide gives IT new tools to manage the chaos and complexity.

Oracle stores Service Tag information in My Oracle Support (MOS), which can be accessed by the user that registered the Service Tag.

Service tags do not contain any personal information. They only provide an inventory list of system and software information. Additionally, service tags are local to your local area network (LAN). See below for more detailed information about the information contained in a service tag.

Several products are discoverable, and more are being added all of the time. To register your Oracle Solaris 8, 9, and 10 Operating System (Oracle Solaris OS), download the Oracle Service Tag package for Oracle Solaris OS.

Discoverable Operating Systems
- Oracle Solaris 8
- Oracle Solaris 9
- Oracle Solaris 10
- RHEL
- OEL
- SuSE
- Windows

A service tag represents a specific asset (software or hardware), and contains two sets of data about that asset. The first component contains data specific to the asset. The second component contains platform data on which the product is installed, or in the case of hardware service tags, data about the hardware asset.

Product Data

As part of the registration process, the user's MOS ID is sent to Oracle. When the registration is submitted, the following product registration information is sent to Oracle:

Data Name	Value
Instance Identifier	Unique identifier for that instance of the product
Product Name	Name of the product
Instance Identifier	Unique identifier for the product being registered
Product Vendor	Vendor of the product
Product Version	Version of the product
Parent Name	The parent product of the registered product
Parent Identifier	Unique identifier for the parent of the product
Customer Tag	Optional customer-defined value
Timestamp	The time the product was registered
Source	Where the Product Registration Identifiers came from
Container	The name of the product's container

The following information is sent to Oracle about the registration agentry on the client system:

Data Name	Value
Agentry Identifier	Unique value for that instance
Agentry Version	Value of the agentry
Registry Identifier	Version of the file containing the product registration information

The following information is sent to Oracle about the system on which the registered products reside:

Data Name	Value
Host	The hostname of the system
System	The Operating System
Release	The version of the Operating System
Architecture	The physical hardware architecture
Platform	The hardware platform
Manufacturer	Hardware manufacturer
CPU Manufacturer	CPU manufacturer
HostID	HostID of the system
Serial Number	Chassis serial number of the system
Physicak Memory	Amount of physical memory
Physical CPUs	Number of physical CPUs
CPU Cores	Number of CPU cores
CPU Threads	Number of CPU threads
CPU Name	Name associated with CPU
Clock Rate	CPU clock rate

No. Service tags are used solely to identify Oracle assets to Oracle. Oracle will use the information to better support you and the rest of our customers. Registration data is only collected when your system administrator requests asset discovery.

Yes. The following are methods for disabling the service:
- Service tags are designed so that you can disable tag generation by asset. If you want to tag your Oracle Solaris OS instances, but not your Java Web ServerTM software, you can disable the tagging capability within the asset.
- You can disable the service tags ability to discover available network listeners. If you disable the discover feature, you can specify explicit IP and port information, and go directly to those listeners.
- To disable service tags completely, disable all network capabilities, including the discovery and TCP listener. This is done on systems running Oracle Solaris 10 and higher, via:

# svcadm disable stlisten stdiscover

No. The service tag components that communicate information are read-only and contained. They are not capable of accepting information, and they cannot communicate with any other services on your system.

No. The service tag does not run until specifically queried by your system administrator. When queried, it runs for a few seconds and takes up less than 100 kilobytes of memory. When not running, the service tag has no impact on system resources.

Each instance of an operating system contains the Oracle Service Tag registry, discovery, listener, and helper service. In addition, each Oracle Solaris OS zone generates a service tag for itself and identifies itself as a local zone or a global zone.

The compiled size for all of the inventory components is 85 kilobytes. The registry size is measured in bytes. When running, the processes can be as large as 140 kilobytes if they use the external libraries that some XML format capabilities require.

For Oracle Solaris 8, 9, and 10 OS versions, service tags are available as Oracle Solaris packages. To enable your Oracle Solaris OS systems with service tags, go to the Service Tag download site. For Oracle Solaris 10 8/07 and later versions, Oracle Service Tags are embedded in the OS.

More information about the Sun Inventory decommission is available on the Sun Inventory decommission FAQ.

The solution to this problem is to omit the Service Tag registry when creating your FLAR image. Using the (-x) option on the flar(1) command is the way to accomplish this:

# flar create -x -n -x /var/sadm/servicetag/registry/servicetag.xml

See the Oracle Solaris 10 Installation Guide for Network Installations for more information about the flar command, and its options.

More information about registering your assets is available on the MOS registration FAQ and on the Oracle Asset Registration page.

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